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There may be other mitigating factors, but the fact remains the vast majority of people can lose weight by changing lifestyle. If you look at an extreme case like Biggest Loser on US TV, these are very obese people who often give up and die or use shortcuts like fad diets or stomach stapling. I think even out of this group only 5% would ever have to resort to something that extreme. The show demonstrates that extreme problems can be met with normal weight lose measures, ie: the formula Galaxy uses to create a calorie deficit (albeit extreme exercise) . I like using the BMR weight loss formula, and its almost impossible not to lose weight that way. One extreme client I had lost 15 pounds in a week and a half using this method. He was a person who never had any limits to his eating whims and rose to almost 380 lbs. He lost 70lbs before some personal problems took him away from his weight loss goal. No fads needed.

I have two close friends who are overweight through no fault of their own, who cannot lose significant weight no matter what they do.

And they have been to doctors, dieticians, tried everything and anything short of surgery for more than ten years now and it is very much a genetic problem they cannot shake.

Well, I think one of the problems is that doctors are usually a bunch of morons when it comes to weight loss.

Really it's a matter of physics and biology.

The formula to lose weight is: Burn more calories than you eat per day.

It is almost impossible to not lose weight by following that. It's simple physics and biology (and math).

Are your friends men or women?

This is simply wrong. You do realize there are medical conditions that prevent normal weight loss, or cause weight gain no matter how little you eat?

Yes I know there are conditions. Hypothyroidism for one. If a doctor has diagnosed this as being the condition, then why doesn't he prescribe medication to correct it?

From my personal experience, doctors tend to take the safest routes to treatment. So if an obese person has a genuinely medical condition, the doctor will likely inform the patient but won't offer medications, rather will suggest the same old rhetoric (eat more veggies, don't eat junk food or red meats, etc).

Another thing is that doctors may be genuinely afraid to tell people to just put some fucking effort and get into a gym, because the patients might be highly insulted and put in a formal complaint against them. So it's easier just to humor the patient and let them continue to be obese.

In extreme cases, gastric bypass surgeries and such can be done. I remember when I tore my tendon. The doctors did not actively help me. I had to research EVERYTHING and basically tell them what I needed, and had to push for a surgery they didn't want to do. Why? Because they rather just let me stay a cripple than have to do actual work? I have no idea. I'm almost back to normal now, but if I had just trusted in "doctor knows best" I'd still be a cripple right now.

However, it is within the grasp of everyone who wants to lose weight to do so.

No, it isn't.

I have two close friends who are overweight through no fault of their own, who cannot lose significant weight no matter what they do.

And they have been to doctors, dieticians, tried everything and anything short of surgery for more than ten years now and it is very much a genetic problem they cannot shake.

Well, I think one of the problems is that doctors are usually a bunch of morons when it comes to weight loss.

Really it's a matter of physics and biology.

The formula to lose weight is: Burn more calories than you eat per day.

It is almost impossible to not lose weight by following that. It's simple physics and biology (and math).

Are your friends men or women?

Actually this is a consistent problem, your average doctor isn't very good with obesity issues, specialists, nutritionists, trainers are often much more useful.

There's a reason there are a lot more obese people today than 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago, and its not becuase our genetics have suddenly gone haywire, its behavior, specifically usually behavior in an atmosphere of abundance.

I have two close friends who are overweight through no fault of their own, who cannot lose significant weight no matter what they do.

And they have been to doctors, dieticians, tried everything and anything short of surgery for more than ten years now and it is very much a genetic problem they cannot shake.

Well, I think one of the problems is that doctors are usually a bunch of morons when it comes to weight loss.

Really it's a matter of physics and biology.

The formula to lose weight is: Burn more calories than you eat per day.

It is almost impossible to not lose weight by following that. It's simple physics and biology (and math).

Are your friends men or women?

Actually this is a consistent problem, your average doctor isn't very good with obesity issues, specialists, nutritionists, trainers are often much more useful.

There's a reason there are a lot more obese people today than 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago, and its not becuase our genetics have suddenly gone haywire, its behavior, specifically usually behavior in an atmosphere of abundance.

Rama, I remember my family doctor giving me a physical, at at the time I was maybe around 20% bodyfat, I can't remember actual percentage. I may have had a bit of a belly, but hardly anything. I was 205lbs.

He put me on the scale and freaked out that I was severely overweight. I remember asking why he thought that, and he said that my BMI was way beyond what I should be. So I asked him what my ideal weight was, and he said it should be 155lbs lol.

I literally started laughing at him. The most lean I have ever been was 173lbs, and I was fucking ripped, 7% bodyfat, and I would get stares like crazy. I wasn't even huge, my arms were like 17" at the time, but I couldn't shake the girls off lol.

The problem is for my type it was extremely hard to keep that level of bodyfat. I'm 18% right now, and I'll be happy if I can get down to 12%.

Most obese people would be overjoyed if they could get to 25%, which is totally doable for 99% of them IMO.

There are a lot of environmental reasons why people are obese. However, it is within the grasp of everyone who wants to lose weight to do so.

Not everyone can be ripped at 7% bodyfat year round, but most people can get to normal weights, even if on the high of normal?

If I remember correctly, as a general rule, a man over 20% bf is starting to become overweight. However, obesity doesn't really kick in until the guy is 30%+ bf.

Some obese people are easily over 50%. That is nuts! that means half the weight you are carrying is just extra fat that you don't need.

If an obese person subceptible to negative external factors made a bit of effort, while it would be very hard for them to become lean, they could at least get into the 20-30% range and would make a huge difference to their health and lifestyle.

There is wide range of body types out there. According to the BMI, I'm obese, with a BMI of 31.8, yet the last time I had my body fat percentage calculated (last week, by a professional with calipers) it came in at 13.2%. In order to reach the "normal" range, I would have to lose every ounce of fat I have, plus an additional 25 pounds, and even then I would be just at the border of normal and overweight. It's not going to happen.

My point is that there's no "one size fits all" for body shape and health. I'm not a runner, but people I know who are routinely talk about seeing overweight and even obese people running marathons and passing up the skinny people. I'm becoming more and more convinced that weight by itself isn't a good predictor of health, but it is often associated with other things that are, and it just happens to be more visible.

RAMA wrote:

There may be other mitigating factors, but the fact remains the vast majority of people can lose weight by changing lifestyle. If you look at an extreme case like Biggest Loser on US TV, these are very obese people who often give up and die or use shortcuts like fad diets or stomach stapling. I think even out of this group only 5% would ever have to resort to something that extreme. The show demonstrates that extreme problems can be met with normal weight lose measures, ie: the formula Galaxy uses to create a calorie deficit (albeit extreme exercise) . I like using the BMR weight loss formula, and its almost impossible not to lose weight that way. One extreme client I had lost 15 pounds in a week and a half using this method. He was a person who never had any limits to his eating whims and rose to almost 380 lbs. He lost 70lbs before some personal problems took him away from his weight loss goal. No fads needed.

RAMA

I agree that fads are a bad idea. In fact, I think the whole concept of a "diet" is a bad idea because it implies that it's a temporary change until the weight is lost. If any lost weight is going to stay off, it can't be because of a "diet", it must be because of a permanent lifestyle change because as soon as the change stops, the weight is coming back.

I read something recently about why it's hard to keep weight off. Statistically, almost no one keeps it off long term. Here's an article I came across a while ago that summarizes some of the most recent research on the subject. I haven't read it in a while, and don't have time to reread it now, but here's what I remember from it. It explains, in plain English, what science has learned about why people who lose weight can't keep the weight off. Basically, what it comes down to is that people who were once obese but have lost weight are metabolically very different from someone else of the same weight who was never obese. Hunger and satiety hormone levels are such that the formerly-obese person (FOP) is driven to eat. MRIs show an enhanced response to food in the brain of the (FOP). The cellular metabolism slows down such that the FOP needs a few hundred less calories per day. Calories are more easily stored as fat and exercise is less effective. And, these results aren't just for a short time after losing weight. It's long term--at least 10 years and probably for life. These metabolic changes kick in once a person has lost about 10% of their weight.

There's a lot more to it than just eating less and exercising more.

__________________
Computers are like the God of the Old Testament: lots of rules and no mercy.

I think the implication of the bacteria screwing up metabolism and the signaling mechansims for fat storage/fat burning impacts the "simple physics" approach of calories in and calories out.

If you put $10 worth of gas in your vehicle every day but don't drive much, it starts to fill up with gas and you start towing an extra tank of it around with you. (I'll call that the 'trailer', which is fed from an overflow condition in your truck's normal tank). If you drive more and fill up less your truck's tank will run low, and this will cause it to start drawing fuel from the trailer to bring the level back to normal, but slowly emptying the trailer. It's kind of like having a reversible fuel pump between the truck's tank and the trailer, and that's kind of how fat storage is supposed to work. If you're used to your vehicle working properly, it runs trim and has a tiny little trailer behind it. When you see people hauling around big semi-truck trailers of gas you think they couldn't be driving very much, and when they do it's just between gas station because all they do is fill up.

But the gut bugs produce a compound that screws up the fuel sensors (probably by evolutionary design), so that the truck's fuel-tank pump always tries to pump fuel into the trailer, whether the truck's tank is really full or not, and won't ever pump fuel from the trailer back to the regular tank. The fuel transfer pump is stuck on, and in one direction, perhaps because the truck's tank level always says "full" and the trailer's sensor always says "empty."

So whenever the defective truck fills up, it immediately starts pumping gas into the trailer, emptying the regular tank earlier, and if driven around like a normal vehicle it just runs out of gas sooner, and won't feed from the trailer, ending up stuck on the side of the road. Simple physics says it has plenty of gas to drive half-way across the country, but it just doesn't seem to tap into the supply to burn any of it. Instead the truck rolls into the nearest gas station and fills up, because to the sensors, and to the carburator, it's out of gas - even though it's towing an entire semi-trailer of fuel around.

For such people, losing weight through the normal mechanisms (which are based on having a working cross-feed system) would be like trying to shrink a tumor by exercising, on the theory that it will eventually burn off.

[...]For such people, losing weight through the normal mechanisms (which are based on having a working cross-feed system) would be like trying to shrink a tumor by exercising, on the theory that it will eventually burn off.

These persons make up only a small percentage of the overweight ones.
Proof is the percentage of the overall population that was overweight in 1900 (or 1950, 60...) by comparison to the percentage of the overall population overweight now.

How is that "proof" when you're comparing pre-epidemic obesity with post-epidemic obesity, given that the question is whether the spread of a particular bacteria constitutes an actual epidemic? This existence of unsymptomatic, uninfected people prior to the spread of the epidemic doesn't really tell you anything.

How is that "proof" when you're comparing pre-epidemic obesity with post-epidemic obesity, given that the question is whether the spread of a particular bacteria constitutes an actual epidemic? This existence of unsymptomatic, uninfected people prior to the spread of the epidemic doesn't really tell you anything.

gturner, the quoted study does NOT prove that:
-bacteria cause obesity in a significant number of cases,
-that these bacteria didn't exist prior to 10 years - an epidemic, recent too? From where exactly did you come up with this, gturner?

The study doesn't even prove unequivocally that there's a link between bacteria and obesity (extremely small sample size, lack of independent confirmation, lack of peer review).

So - the percentage of the overall population that was overweight in 1900 (or 1950, 60...) by comparison to the percentage of the overall population overweight now IS proof (corroborated with all the other proof regarding diet and lifestyle) that most cases of obesity are due to diet/sedentarism.

The CDC had already established that the obesity epidemic actually seems to spread from person to person, exactly like a disease as far as the epidemiology was concerned, but had no explanation as to why it would act this way. Some studies subsequent to that found that many fat people seemed to have different populations of gut bugs than thin people, and that the gut bugs in fat people were more efficient at converting food into digestible calories.

Another groundbreaking study in Scandinavia found that people's lifetime baseline metabolism was determined in the womb (comparing WW-II era babies that were carried to term during famine with normal babies born before and after the famine years). Other species also seem to do this, an evolutionary method of tuning offspring to their future environment's energy availability. During the Korean War American POWs were literally starving to death while being fed better than their North Korean guards, whose low-metabolic energy requirements were adapted to extremely low calorie intakes.

So given all that, this study is not that unexpected. We had once proved that ulcers were caused by stress and diet - until it was proved to be caused by a bacteria called Heliobactor pylori, overturning the conventional medical wisdom.

Back in the 1900's, and the 1950's, and the 1960's, people didn't spend their time jogging and going to the weight room, or paying for personal trainers, or buying rooms full of exercise equipment like stationary bikes and treadmills. They also ate high-fat, high-calorie diets (steak and potatoes, potatoes and steak, bacon and eggs with a side of meatloaf). Even the breeds of meat were high fat, with everyone wanting beef and pork with lots of marbleing. Diet foods, which now fill whole aisles of the supermarket, were virtually unheard of. They still didn't get fat in the numbers we have now.

What did happen since the 1950's is that everyone in the West, but especially America, started being given high-dose antibiotics for just about everything, even colds and flu. Anti-biotics can severely impact gut-bug populations, drastically shifting the equilibrium, often wiping almost all of them out, making the gut available for re-population by opportunistic strains picked up from friends and family - who, if they are fat, would be much more likely to carry either the fat-inducing gut bugs or the more efficient calorie-scavenging gut bugs.

And under no currently accepted understandings could gastric bypass surgery cure diabetes in two or three days, yet it seems to be doing so in what, about 80% of cases? One day we may look back on the total diet and exercise view of obesity as being as primitive and silly as blaming epidemics on people's sinful ways and their rejection of God. Future studies will see whether this is, in fact, the case.

From the New England Journal of Medicine, a survey of 12,000 patients from the Framingham Heart Study found that if one of your friends becomes obese, your own chances of becoming obese go up by 57%.

Background: The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Results: Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], > or =30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.

Conclusion: Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.

Diet and lifestyle certainly play a large role, but that's no reason to ignore the possibility that other factors that might also be at work, and body fat is regulated by a lot of signaling mechanisms.

The study doesn't even prove unequivocally that there's a link between bacteria and obesity (extremely small sample size, lack of independent confirmation, lack of peer review).

You might think that if the linked article was all there was, but that was just a popular press review of an actual article from a scientific journal. Sure, it was a short communication, rather than a full-length paper, but it was still peer-reviewed and legitimate science.